by Paul Daley
Drysdale’s parched brown-paper-bag Elmer Fudd voice is saying, Mr Slattery has put the safety of the entire nation at risk. If there’s a terrorist attack on home soil now, he can explain to the Australian people why it is that he refused to give the government sufficient power to stop it happening.
Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit, I yell to nobody, although Stan naturally thinks I’m addressing him because he’s the only other person in the car.
Bad day, boss?
The worst.
Want to talk?
Nope. No offence.
If ever I want the world to know how I’m feeling or if I want to spread a rumour, I’ll tell a Comcar driver. It’s as good as speaking off the record to the Electric Eel or the Illusionist. Every minute or so my phone buzzes and pings. I’m watching the texts pop up—from Kirsty Usher and Freebody, Crawley and Jamieson, and, more importantly, Errol. They’re all watching the Grimes interview. Freebody and Jamieson both say stuff like convincing and well done, boss as if I’ve never gone head-to-head with some smart arse on TV before. But Usher, who knows a thing or two about break-ups and girly pain, writes: Danny, I understand. It must have been very hard.
When I get to Tom’s place, he shows me in, says, Quick—I don’t want to miss the end of your interview. And so we watch TV together even though there’s far more pressing stuff on my mind now, like whether he knows Chisel is actually Vaughan Charles and that my father could be a bank-robbing murderer called Terry Morgan.
We go into the lounge room. A fire is smouldering in the grate and above it, fixed to the wall, a flat-screen TV with my solemn, earnest dial on it.
It cuts to Grimes’s porcine face disingenuously closing the interview with, Mr Daniel Slattery, thanks for your time, and me responding with: Well, as I said, Antony, I did this most reluctantly because I did not want to cause any more pain to anybody involved, least of all to Domenica’s family or to my wife and children. But really I felt that you gave me no option to explain, as best as I could, what happened because you were preparing to air one side of a story only. And, as anybody can tell you, it’s impossible for outsiders to look into someone else’s marriage and to come away with the full story.
Danny, that was art, mate. Art. A. R. T., Tom says. He is so elated that he actually claps his hands. In the same movement he stands up, grasps a small log from the pile next to the deep hearth and throws it in.
He reclines in his armchair, his jeans rolled up at the bottom above bare feet. On a small coffee table next to the chair, his iPad lays open. In his Levi’s, t-shirt and open fleece, his salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair, he evokes more of the ageing rock-star-turned-lair-of-the-manor than a priest. The Bono of Saint Christopher’s.
Tom pours Bushmills. I lunge for the glass like Vadge at a pink doughnut and gulp. He re-pours.
What a day, Tom, I say. I’m really wondering if it’s all worth it.
Depends on what price you’re paying and for what, Danny. You’re the leader of a great party. That’s an end in itself. If that was your main achievement in life besides footy, besides being a dad and a husband—even if you never became prime minister—then that would be quite something, right? No matter what happens next. You’d have to say that was worth what you’ve paid. Surely?
Tom has always got twitchy—no, more than that, really, more like indignant and more than a bit righteous—when I’ve questioned the values of the party and the personal price of politics. He defends the party when I say it’s morally vacuous and meaningless—reckons I’m more focused on the personalities who are snapping at my heels than what the organisation and its history actually represents in a broader sense.
I sometimes reckon Tom has totally idealised the party because of his father. Yes, through the law firm, as a minister and later as a prime minister, Paddy promoted the values at the historic heart of the party. But to me, because of where I come from, there will always be a discomfiting paternalism about Paddy McQuoid, Vince Dethridge—and, yes, Tom.
Sure they looked out for the working poor in a let-me-tell-you-what’s-best-for-you kind of way. And they had this rose-coloured view of who the early rising workers with dirty hands actually were—all honest and good, fine family people deserving of a safety net when times were crook—and no idea that poverty also bred dishonest fuckwits like Maggot that the world would be better without.
And the other problem was that Paddy McQuoid and Vince Dethridge and Tom could never actually, really empathise with any of the people they insisted they were helping and upon whose support they built their reputations in public life.
So the question always lingers about them in my mind. Was their benevolence genuine—or was it really just all about them?
Sure, it’s true that I’ve never shied away, what with the Window of Optimism and stuff, from being prescriptive about what the poor and the disadvantaged need. But the real difference between me and the McQuoids and Dethridge is that I’ve lived the problems of the afflicted.
I can genuinely feel their pain. And I know what they need.
Even if they don’t.
33
Like Ana, Tom knows all about family skin in the game. As a toddler Tom lost his father to the party. And now, fifty years later, regaining the treasury benches Paddy lost for us in 1993 has become pretty much his life’s work.
He’s always said that no matter how bad our party gets—no matter how far it shifts to the Right, how often it cannibalises itself over leadership, how detached it becomes from the punters—the Tories will always be worse.
I’d always believed that, too. But I’m no longer sure.
McQuoid, Dethridge and Holden weren’t ideologically or historically tribal in quite the same way as so many of the big factional boys who’d come and gone through the party, the unions and the parliament.
Sure, in that old-fashioned Mick/Grouper way they were suspicious of the Trots on the Left and keeping the Right ascendant was important. But they wouldn’t die in a ditch over their faction’s traditional ideology. And so they struck deals with the Left and undermined their own factional comrades on policies and preselections as blithely as they cheated on their wives. Winning was everything.
Don’t get me wrong. These boys had a bottom line: the party was the best vehicle to further the interests of the low-paid and forgotten—and the only platform to consolidate the hegemony of their progressive Catholic views, their power and their individual ambitions.
During his ten years in The Lodge, Reggie Holden became the most popular PM we’ve ever had. A not-so-reformed drunk and an open philanderer, a patchy churchgoer who nonetheless liked the rituals of it—and who always made sure the cameras were waiting outside if he attended Sunday service—he was as handy with willow as he was with a handshake or a microphone, into which words of reassuring consensus rolled from his tongue like so much honey.
He could swear, get on the sauce, make a lewd comment about the entrants to a beauty pageant or pinch a girl journo’s bottom—and his public opinion ratings would go up. But he had a gift for straight talking; he was as no-bullshit and honest about his own personal failings as he seemed energetic in protecting the working man.
Under Reg, manufacturing-industry protection saved hundreds of thousands of our supporters their jobs. Then there were the first-home buyers’ bonuses for blue-collar workers, cash payments if they bought new Aussie cars, means-tested dental care—all paid for by company tax increases, trust crackdowns, attacks on middle-class welfare, the introduction of Fringe Benefits Tax and a Mining Tax that took a share of the billions in profits of the big mining companies.
He ran a reforming government, driven by the likes of Vince Dethridge, his attorney-general, and Pat McQuoid, his deputy and treasurer. But he also befriended the bosses, pumped money into the arts and sport, and sucked up to the Yanks and the Jews.
Of course he was a bloody awful father, too.
His youngest, Bernie, ran wild around Canberra when Reggie was PM. Kicke
d out of the grammar school for dealing dope, he worked the rigs for a bit. Developed a habit. Turned up dead at twenty-two. The cops found him with a pick in his arm at a shooting gallery in the Currong Flats.
Reg had just won a fourth term when Bernie flamed out. Reggie’s wife, Margie, blamed him and politics. Then promptly sank into despair, went bonkers and started pinching stuff from Woolies. Next she was in and out of the psych ward. Reg hit the bottle harder, roamed round The Lodge in his PJs till midday, stopped doing the job while the government drifted dangerously for eighteen months.
All the factional so-called warlords lacked the balls to tap Reg on the shoulder. Weak as piss as usual. One or two of the backbenchers pleaded publicly for him to walk while he was ahead. But he refused, insisting he could take us to just one more.
So Paddy and Vince went to see him, begged him to go in the name of his legacy. But they knew like I know that real leaders never walk. They’re Araldited to their seats. If you want ’em gone you’ve got to blast the fuckers out. Nobody else was game. But Paddy and Vince wouldn’t flinch if it meant getting what they regarded as theirs.
One Sunday afternoon McQuoid left Reg staring vacantly into the pool at The Lodge, having told him it was over and that he was about to announce his challenge. True to his word, ten minutes later McQuoid held a doorstep out the front of parliament.
Reggie Holden has left me no choice, he said, because a good government has lost its way.
Only then, when they sniffed death on the breeze, did the factional boys, the warriors, run from Reg like he’d farted in a lift. So it was that Reg quit just before the caucus vote and Paddy McQuoid’s fratricide earned him unopposed election to the prime ministership.
Paddy won the next, unwinnable, election. Inevitably he lost the next. By which stage Holden—having lost all recall of his time in The Lodge to dementia—was in a nursing home and Margie was dead, ostensibly of an aneurysm. But everyone knew the sadder truth: she was another casualty of public life and political ego.
When Paddy was well out the other side of politics and I was just on the way in, he told me that the most empowering, uplifting day of his life was the one when he rolled Holden. I thought it an odd sentiment to attach to offing a bloke who he had, over the years, described as a brother.
Honestly, he said, I felt like I’d just slain a giant.
I wanted to say, Paddy, mate, it’s Tom, not me, who’s the priest.
But he just carried on, said, I’ve never been to war—but Vince has and when I described to him what I felt, he reckoned that’s how it is the first time you kill a man. He said that’s exactly how he felt after he shot his first Jap in New Guinea.
Now, I still hold Dawes personally responsible for the suicide of my mate, Biscuits. Despite that, I felt no great sense of schadenfreude when I rolled Dawes. I thought he was a prick—gutless, useless, venal, sneaky and weak. But what I did to him I did because I had to. It was politics. That’s all.
That Paddy, my mentor and patron, could feel so damned good about knifing a bloke who was practically family and, notwithstanding, who’d been our most successful ever leader—still makes me queasy. It reverberates, a tremor in my soul, through to my present. Mostly, though, it lends insight into Tom’s political constitution, makes me ask myself just how big a chip he is off the old block.
How naive. How very fucking naive.
The McQuoids and Dethridges recognised that in me. But as rich, privately educated Catholics they could no more genuinely understand the lives of those they acted for—in the firm or later in parliament— than they could relate to the factory workers, butchers and cabbies they played next to at the club in the forties and fifties.
Paddy’s four years in The Lodge did not satisfy their ambitions. Despite the massive swing against Paddy in 1993, he and Vince had never seen Drysdale as anything but unworthy—a pedestrian little suburban accountant of prosaic tastes and interests who would plunge the country from their Enlightenment back into the industrial and social dark ages of the fifties.
They had made it the last chapter of their lives’ work to reshape their party and to find the leadership candidate who could win it back for them. And after a fair bit of trial and error, they eventually chose me—an option they’d been cultivating and grooming one way or another for decades. They sound like kiddy fiddlers, I know. But in a way they were nothing more than political rock spiders, these two—blokes who’d groom the youngsters in the party to sate their own political ends.
They first started openly talking about getting me into parliament in 1993, just after they lost. I was a former football player with a brain, a social conscience, a law degree, time as Vince’s associate, and, not least, a great personal narrative of success against odds. As a potential member of the future leadership crop, that also included Dawes, Crawley, Skinner and eventually the Sweeties and of course, that little toad Proudfoot, I was a roughie—a longshot worth cultivating and backing.
There was the matter of my messy first marriage and the tragedy of Domenica’s suicide. But as far as they were concerned, an untidy personal life was a matter to be managed in politics through a combination of gents’ agreements, family complicity earned through the trappings of comfortable life, and astute public relations. For them, Domenica was just a PR problem, something I, we, could spin our way out of. And I’m ashamed, sickened for once having seen her that way, too.
In this, my new era of honesty and introspection, I have to concede that McQuoid and Dethridge had been investing in and manipulating my future for years—pretty much since Tom and I bonded as fourteen-year-olds over the demolition of Maggot at the village shops. Or, worst-case scenario, even significantly longer than that.
One of the last things Vince confided to me before a stroke stole his capacity for speech and confined him to The Cedars, was that he and Paddy had paid my school fees when Mum defaulted on the bill for the balance that the scholarship didn’t meet. Paddy and Vince were on the school board. Mum never received another bill. My books and uniforms were also taken care of.
Saw it as an investment, Dan, Vince said—a bloody good investment it was, too. But we don’t want you to piss it up against the wall now.
That was when Dawes was on the rocks—all over the fucking place on the policy and the strategy and not too long after I’d quit the shadow cabinet because of Biscuits.
Paddy and Vince and Tom and Ana were urging me to run. I was saying I didn’t know if the time was right, with the twins just at school and Ana trying to get her career back on track. I wanted to wait and see for a bit.
It was Paddy who said that those who choose their timing in public life die wondering. You look at that Drysdale and his weak prick deputy Anderson, always the fucking bridesmaid—weak as piss, mate, weak as piss, he said. You get the chance to challenge, you just damn well do it, son. It’s time for the pay-off.
The pay-off! There it was.
It didn’t get much clearer: they’d seen me through school and brought me to the club’s attention. I’d quickly learned to wrap my brain around a brief at McQuoid, Dethridge & Partners and then won kudos as Vince’s associate once Paddy appointed him to the High Court in 1992—one of his last acts as PM, when it was clear he was heading for a hiding at the next election.
I was their investment. They lived, in their latter years, for payday. Paddy died of lung cancer just after I got the leadership and now Vince is in God’s Waiting Room.
Now, only Tom remains as keeper of the flame, railing against the evils of Drysdale from the pulpit—trying to keep the party pragmatic but also on the policy straight and narrow, picking leadership winners. And losers.
Yes, Tom saved me more than once when I was a kid.
But in my guts I’ve always known that he can just as easily dispense with me.
34
Tom refills, says, Danny, brilliant, brilliant—fucking brilliant. They’re never going to hold it against you now. They’ll be behind you—you know, such an
awful bloody thing, how could they not? They know it was just one of those human tragedies—never your fault, Danny. You couldn’t stop what happened. Just like you couldn’t stop Biscuits from killing himself.
Tom—I could have, I say.
Could’ve what?
Could’ve stopped Domenica.
Danny, we went through all this at the time, remember? You’re being pretty bloody hard on yourself, mate. I said then and I say now—you didn’t exactly make her do it.
You know—I think I might’ve. And Tom, we never really went through it at the time. You were—are—a supportive mate. But we’ve never really talked honestly about it, just like a whole lot of other stuff. Back then, like now, you just told me not to hold myself responsible. You wanted me to pick myself up and get on with it. It’s like so many things in our lives together, Tom, that we’ve just brushed over, never talked through properly.
Tom is ignoring his iPad as it pings with text messages. I can see some of the names that pop up, including Proudfoot, D. Sweety and Deveson—even Vagnoli and Fitzgerald, for fuck’s sake. Usher, Crawley, too. Curious, that. What do they want?
Some of them, I know, talk to Tom regularly to find out what I’m thinking. Proudfoot, the Sweeties and Fitz—a backbench senator, former right-wing union official and numbers guy—are hardcore Micks. Dave and Gaz Sweetman, and little Timmy Proudfoot, are practically the same tribe as Tom—and crazy Jack Dethridge who went to the same Catholic boys’ college as all of us, just a decade later.
Unlike me, though, none were outsider scholarship boys. They came from wealthy pillar families. The Sweeties and Timmy Proudfoot later went through Law and Commerce at Monash, did time with the same essentially Grouper union and stacked the branches where Paddy McQuoid and Vince Dethridge left off. Married girls from the top-notch rich-bitch sister school, did church every Sunday, daily in Lent, fish on Fridays, baptised their kids and kept their misdemeanours tightly quarantined.
